About Alfred Edward Housman
Alfred Edward Housman also known as A. E. Housman, was a famous and popular english poet and writer, best known for his A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their beauty, simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.Housman was one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest poets who ever lived. Housman began writing a new set of poems after the First World War. He was an influence on many British poets who became famous by their writing about the war, and wrote several poems as occasional verse to commemorate the war dead. In the early 1920s, when Moses Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman wanted to assemble his best unpublished poems so that Jackson could read them before his death. Here are published a selection of his most appreciated and best poems from his last books: Last Poems and More Poems published posthumely.
Browse all poems and texts published on Alfred Edward Housman
Housman was one of the foremost classicists of his age and has been ranked as one of the greatest poets who ever lived.
